Saturday, March 7, 2015

Slice of Life, #7

Today I
spent a few hours at MoMA as part of the Art+Feminism Edit-a-Thon to upgrade
Wikipedia’s quantity and quality of entries on women generally and women
artists specifically. The Wikipedia world is arcane and complicated Beneath its
veneer of populism, Wikipedia, founded in 2011, is run largely, 84%-92%, by men, and its entries largely reflect these men's interests and range of knowledge.

We were
given a half-hour training, in which we were introduced to the structure of a
Wikipedia page, the purpose of the various tabs, how to create our user profile
(and how to use Wiki markup, a simplified html), how
to make an edit, how to add a citation or new text, how to communicate with
other Wikipedians. Then we were allowed to start working, either by finding
some women artists’ entries to add citations or new information to or, if we
had more time, to try to create a new article entirely. Most important, we were
told about the Wikipedia guidelines: (1) be objective (and avoid conflict of
interest); (2) articles must be verifiable through reliable, published sources;
and (3) entries had to be notable, notability being shown by having at least
three different references from major publications in the field.

Notability,
to me, is the elephant in the Wikipedia universe. Since women are still often
overlooked in mainstream culture and history, how will they pass the standard
of notability? I never got a good answer to this question.

I tried to create a new article, and immediately
ran into the problem of finding enough outside sources online to meet
“notability” guidelines. Next, I found
the director of an organization I helped start, but her entry was in Polish. I
learned how I could translate it into English using Google Translate, edit it
into idiomatic English, and reformat the footnotes. But the conflict of
interest question arose, and I will need to do more research.

While I
didn’t make any changes to Wikipedia, I did meet some very interesting women:
Debra Harris, who runs hip-hop tours for tourists to New York; Lady K, a
hip-hop artist; a journalist who’s had to turn to corporate work as it’s harder
than ever to make a living in journalism; and the various Wikipedia editors
both female and male who were so helpful. It was a fun and exciting afternoon,
and I hope to keep trying to get more women and better citations, and writing,
into Wikipedia.